Grant Bourzikas

Grant Bourzikas is chief information security officer (CISO) and vice president of McAfee Labs strategy and data science.
As CISO, Bourzikas is responsible for McAfee’s cybersecurity and physical security strategy, including security architecture and solutions delivery, security governance, risk and vulnerability, and security operations and intelligence programs. As McAfee’s Customer Zero, he is responsible for protecting the McAfee organization by implementing and operationalizing McAfee endpoint security, advanced threat detection, security and event management, and cloud security products.
As VP of McAfee Labs strategy and data science, Bourzikas is responsible for driving the vision and strategic direction for McAfee’s threat intelligence data architecture platform. In addition, he leads our data science organization, focused on defining the overall data strategy and governance for McAfee Labs.
Prior to this role, Bourzikas spent 19 years in cybersecurity strategy, architecture, engineering, and operations. He is a four-time CISO, having expanded his experience at a Fortune 500 gaming company, a top financial services bank and brokerage organization, and a Fortune 500 critical infrastructure utility company. Bourzikas began his career in public accounting, leading cybersecurity strategy and assessment consulting teams.
Bourzikas holds a bachelor’s degree in accounting from the University of Missouri–St. Louis and is a certified public accountant. He is working on his master’s in data science and machine learning at Southern Methodist University. Additionally, he was named one of Computerworld’s “40 Innovative People to Watch, Under the Age of 40.”

In a world where the lines between personal and corporate data and devices are increasingly blurred, companies benefit when they take the time to educate all staff about online safety. Both the volume and sophistication of cyber threats are growing, and we are more exposed than ever with the level of always-on connectivity constantly at ...

As cyber threats grow increasingly sophisticated, staying ahead of bad actors is proportionately more challenging. Hackers, data theft, and viruses have been around for decades, but the stakes have raised significantly. The WannaCry ransomware attack last year was the first time we’ve seen worm tactics combined with ransomware on a major scale, infecting at least ...

Whether you’re racing to fill cybersecurity jobs to keep up with the changing threat landscape or support your company’s rapid growth, getting your team trained and at the top of their game is a high priority. You need to ensure all new hires are operating with the same baseline of knowledge and skills as your ...

The demand for cybersecurity talent is outpacing supply across the entire business landscape. Depending on what research you reference, experts predict that by 2020 there will be around 1.5 million to 2 million cybersecurity roles unfilled. This makes employee retention more important than ever before to ensuring the stability and security of your organization. When ...

Has it been a year? It seems longer. When the WannaCry ransomware attack hit tens of thousands of individuals and business around the world on May 12, 2017, it wasn’t the first time we had seen ransomware, but its impact was unique and lasting. We’ve all known for decades about hackers, information thefts, computer viruses ...

The third in a series of three blogs by Grant and Jason on the process of identifying actionable insights. In this series, we’ve been examining how data is collected, processed and analyzed. And, because of the complexity of the task at that analysis stage, we’ve been looking at the task of augmenting human analyst capability ...

The second in a series of three blogs by Grant and Jason on the process of identifying actionable insights. In the last post in this series, we looked at the process by which data is collected from the operating environment and is then processed and distributed in a consumable manner as information. The collection and ...

The first in a series of three blogs by Grant and Jason on the process of identifying actionable insights. A couple of weeks ago we discussed the process security operations teams go through to separate the signal from the noise. We reviewed the steps that McAfee has undertaken in designing its Security Fusion Centers to ...

Depending on whose study you believe, there is going to be a shortage of 1.5 million or more cybersecurity professionals in 2020. As McAfee re-emerged from Intel as an independent company, we have stood up our own fusion of converged physical and security operations center (SOC) functions in the past nine months. We have been very ...

In security operations, we frequently talk about the difficulties in separating the signal from the noise to detect legitimate threats and disregard false alarms. Data overload is a common problem and triage becomes a critical skill to hone and develop. As the chief information security officer (CISO) for McAfee, I am aware at multiple levels ...